Sunday, July 10

It's been the kind of day where at some point one had better plans, but in
the end what one does is lay about one's basement apartment acting out some
stereotype of reclusive dorkitude.

Me, I drank half a bottle of Evan Williams, ate a box of bunny-shaped mac
& cheese, and contemplated a dead Science Fiction writer while messing
around with the operating system on my laptop.

★

So I walked into Boulder Book Store around 10:15 on Friday night, the
pleasures of sitting alone in a Pearl Street bar having pretty well exhausted
themselves. Lately I've been edging back towards a reading habit, by way of
people like Ian McDonald and Charlie Stross. Fiction — SF in particular
— seems to have something to say to me again. So it probably makes sense
that I picked up the first volume of this authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr.

"Authorized biography" is one of those phrases I usually read as a warning,
and there's definitely an element of hagiography in this one. Patterson's
ideological commitments don't appear to contain many surprises. That said,
having gotten a bit past the part where Heinlein is working on Upton Sinclair's
Depression-era campaign for Governor of California, this is fascinating stuff.
The research clearly went deep, and every couple of pages some incident or idea
crops up that I remember from the fiction.